Why Do Christians Misinterpret The Bible?

There are many reasons to why we often misinterpret the Bible. Most common thing that Christians do is taking the words out of context and use it the way they want to. Taking sentence or phrase out of context and leads to a different meaning of the original message. When we pulled individual verses out of the text, we ignored the surrounding paragraph which causes us to misunderstanding the real definition of that story. Schultz talks about the four types of Biblical context which could be distinguished when discussing the Bible; Literary context, Historical-Cultural Context, Salvations-Historical context, and theological-thematic context. Literary context is the text surrounding an individual verse or passage. By examining the literary context, it could prevent
Learning about the Salvations-Historical context is useful when reading the book. The example giving in this section is 1 Corinthians 10:5, where God was angry at the people, and he punished them. Outside reader who came across this story could develop a fear of God or even have negative views of him. However, if you read the whole passage you would understand why he was angry, and his punishments would be more reasonable. The purpose of this passage is to teach people lessons, and later believers could learn from their failure. Lastly, Theological-thematic context is focusing on the big message or the theme of the story. Even though sometimes interpreters may disagree with the primary message of the book but, in the end, they would agree on the dominant theological themes. Our problem is that we took the simple message out of context and followed it because we feel like we need something out of the text or something to make us feel better. This leads to a misunderstanding of the whole motive of the Biblical. I’ve learned that we need to read carefully and interpreted the Bible the way God wants us to instead of how we want